I noticed the one bright spot in the article is debian, though even that's broken for me thanks to systemd.
I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd.
Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x.
(Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with pulseaudio, and the new session stack regularly perma-blanked by screen until I rebooted. I can't reliably share machines with family members because elogin is so bad.)
GTK were talking about dropping X11 support at some point, so X11 folks using GTK apps would probably need to some sort of Wayland to X11 proxy, or to migrate from Xorg to some sort of multi-protocol display server that supports both X11 and Wayland, like Mir from Canonical/Ubuntu, or Arcan.
I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd.
Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x.
(Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with pulseaudio, and the new session stack regularly perma-blanked by screen until I rebooted. I can't reliably share machines with family members because elogin is so bad.)